Writing is where observation becomes inquiry. Across culture, media, ethics, sustainability, and public life, I use research to question familiar categories, examine competing perspectives, and understand the systems that shape how people and communities are represented.
Project 1
The Construction of Chineseness in the International Fashion System
When Chinese designers enter the global fashion system, how does a brand come to be read as recognizably "Chinese"? This paper examines how Chineseness takes shape across designers' cultural positioning, design and brand narratives, and external interpretation. Comparing five Chinese and diasporic designer brands, with interviews with ZHAOYI YU and AO YES, it traces how these meanings are expressed, circulated, and reframed across media and fashion systems.
Through discourse and visual analysis, I argue that “Chineseness” is not a fixed aesthetic category, but a negotiated label shaped by cultural expectation, global fashion institutions, and unequal power over interpretation.
This essay examines the tension between freedom of expression and social accountability in digitally networked public life. Drawing on John Stuart Mill and William Clifford, I compare China's Xianzi #MeToo case with the U.S. case of Justine Sacco.
Rather than asking whether cancel culture is simply right or wrong, I distinguish between making public claims, repeating them without sufficient evidence, and calling for punishment. I argue that public accusation can serve as legitimate social critique, while punishment should follow careful review rather than collective judgment; government intervention risks becoming both impractical and a threat to free expression.
Human Rights Field Report — The Section 377 Case in India
This collaborative field report examines India's Section 377 case as both a landmark legal transformation and an unfinished human-rights struggle. Tracing the movement from a colonial-era law to the 2018 Navtej Singh Johar judgment, we analyzed how courts, NGOs, public-health actors, activists, families, and LGBTQ+ communities contributed to decriminalization.
We also designed a rights-based fieldwork framework combining legal analysis, interviews, questionnaires, and public-event observation, with particular attention to consent, privacy, representation, trauma, and the communities often excluded from dominant narratives.
Sports mega-events create environmental pressures that vary with the cities that host them. Using the Super Bowl as our main case, my team built an LCA-based framework to evaluate these impacts across different stages of the event.
We modeled past and prospective host cities to identify key drivers of environmental burden, including travel and energy use, before adapting the framework to the Olympic Games to test its broader applicability.
Why do certain cultural forms become immediately recognizable as “Yi culture,” while internal differences remain less visible? Drawing on my 2024 fieldwork and interviews in Xichang and surrounding areas, this paper examines Yi script, lacquerware, embroidery, festivals, and Bimo rituals across public signs, shops, brands, restaurants, and performances. I explore how repeated forms of public display shape what audiences recognize as representative of “Yi culture,” while local differences may persist, narrow, or take on new meanings as cultural practices move into public display.
